Our Day by Design

We had a fabulous Christmas and New Year, and despite having a week and a half off work, I was so not ready to go back to work on the 5th of January. Before I carry on with my Maldives honeymoon recaps {which I WILL finish before our 1st anniversary} and better late than never, here's a recap of Christmas 2010! I will start with our tree & decorations. Although we didn't have a lot of time this year to get our decorations up, we managed to get most of them out on the 20th of December. I only took them all down at the weekend as I wanted to get a little longer to enjoy them. Our Christmas tree is an artificial one we got from Dobbies garden centre a couple of years ago; its quite large so the rest of the year it lives at my parents house! I love all of the decorations on our tree, many of which have been individual ones bought while on holiday, rather than sets of decorations. Since we have so many decorations, this year I added a separate ornament tree, from John Lewis, on ...

I was feeling a little delicate this morning, probably due to all of the curry, so I was a bit worried about getting on the bus for a long drive. After the bumpy mini bus journey back down to meet the bus, we had to pick up the other two members of our group who had stayed in the town so I was able to use the facilities before we set off! The trip back was long, around 6 hours (300 miles), as I don't think we had realised how far we had gone into Sri Lanka over the last week and the roads down from the hills were very twisty. The roads through the plantations were scenic so there was plenty to see on the way. We passed through the Edinburgh plantation then were able to make a quick stop for photographs, which was good since my attempts from the bus weren't working out too well! We also stopped for a longer break at a waterfall viewpoint. When we reached Kith ulgala, we stopped for a buffet lunch at a local restaurant. This was where they filmed The Bridge on the River Kwai ...

After breakfast the next morning, our cases were packed on to the bus and we were off on our way to Nuwara Eliya. Before we left Kandy we stopped at a Batik workshop, where we were told how they create batik and were able to watch the workers making some of the art. The conditions were cramped to say the least but it was fascinating to watch the batik process. Our next stop was a silk maker, where again we were told all about how they made silk and given the chance to look around the shop; Graham bought me a lovely grey silk scarf. Then we went to a traditional arts & crafts shop where we had a chance to get some souvenirs since we hadn't had any time beforehand to shop. Here I got a small Sri Lankan mask that I hung on our tree this year and an elephant magnet to add to my magnet collection. We got back on the bus and started our drive through the hill country, towards our next destination, Nuwara Eliya , which is located 6 ,000 feet above sea level. On the way we drove past...